Showtime with Sasha

Ryan Reynolds spends 94 minutes inside a box, trying to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Imagine for a moment you wake up and your entire world is black. The air is hot and confined, and you are most definitely trapped someplace. You reach for your Zippo lighter but you can barely move. When you wrestle it from your pocket and light it, your worst fears are confirmed. You’re buried. Can you do what it takes to survive before your air runs out? Is there anything at all you can do to get out? Ryan Reynolds finds himself in just this situation in his Sundance Film Festival offering titled “Buried.” He wakes up in a wooden box buried beneath the desert sand of Iraq. He’s wet with blood and the only items he has are that Zippo, a flask filled with alcohol, a knife and a cell phone. This all happens after terrorists attack his civilian truck convoy. The terrorists kill his fellow contractors and take him hostage, only to tuck him in a cheap coffin a few deep in the sand. He has little luck calling for help. The FBI, after all, isn’t in Iraq, and his own company isn’t certain where in the vast desert he is located. Things only get worse when the terrorists call him, requesting he use the cell phone to video record their ransom demands from within his claustrophobic nightmare. Oh yes, and then a snake decides to examine his pant leg. I commend Reynolds for taking on this film. Not just any actor can keep audience members on the edges of their seats by spending 94 minutes with him inside of a box. I was just so excited to see this picture, now available on DVD, and I really built it up into an exciting experiment that I thought would take away my breath. The film poster, after all, boasts praises like “mesmerizing,” “enthralling,” a “master class” and “twisted suspense.” While I did like aspects of the film and I found myself talking to Reynolds’ character as if he could hear me, in the end I’m not a fan.